Cooking from the Blogs-What I Made

On Friday, Tiffany from Eat at Home posted this wonderful list of Fall recipes that she has on her blog.  On the list were a couple of recipes that I had meant to try but hadn't yet.  Since I was planning to cook a beef roast and make cookies I decided to use a couple of her recipes.

Since I had a sirloin tip roast on hand and an opened jar of applesauce in my refrigerator from making the Pumpkin/Apple Butter, I decided to make Harvest Apple Pot Roast.  I did a couple of things differently from Tiffany.  I like my roasts studded with garlic, so I sliced a couple of garlic cloves, stabbed holes all over the roast at about 1-inch intervals and inserted the sliced garlic pieces into the holes.  I also like to brown my meat before I put it in the slow cooker.  So I did that and poured the beef broth/applesauce mixture into the skillet and scraped up the browned bits from browning the roast and than added that to the slow cooker.  I was feeling a little lazy so I used dried, minced onions instead of fresh.

I generally do not like beef roasts done in the slow cooker.  They get too done to suit me, and I do not like my meat to fall apart as sometime happens.  I have found that, for me, most time estimates for cooking beef in the slow cooker are too long.  I have learned to check the meat with a meat thermometer after about 4 hours on  low.  In the case of this roast, it was done to medium rare at that time.  Since it was still a couple hours until dinner time, I had to leave the roast in so it was well done in the end.  It did hold it's shape, however, sliced nicely, and did not fall apart.

I found my gravy needed a little "pick me up" so I added a tablespoon of Worcestershire Sauce to it.  I used a Italian Dressing Mix that I had purchased at Dollar Tree.  The "Good Seasons" brand Tiffany used may have been more flavorful.

I was losing my daylight, so even though it wasn't quite time to eat, I took the roast out to take its photo.  I am pretty well convinced that meat is just not very photogenic.  We do not eat dinner early, and I will have to remember that, for the next several months, I will not have daylight at dinner time.

I needed to make some cookies for my hubby to take with him today when he went with the snowmobile club to do some clean up in the mountains.  He likes molasses cookies, so I decided to try the Moosehunter Cookies.   Tiffany got this recipe from Mennonite Girls Can Cook.  This is a Canadian blog that I also love.  These are chocolate cookies with a molasses undertone.  Without the molasses in them, the cookies would be very like the Chocolate Drop Cookies which were the very first recipes I posted on this blog.  There is no picture on that post, but if there was, it would look much like the photo above.  Those cookies do have nuts in them.  The Moosehunter Cookies (I love the name!) have a white icing to go on top.  Because my hubby was taking these in a sack lunch, I left the icing off.  I am sure that the cookies are even better with the icing addition.

Thanks, Tiffany, for two great recipes that I will make again and also for the reminder list of the delicious recipes on your blog.